Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD on the incredible life of English feminist, socialist, & rebel, Sylvia Pankhurst.

“I am going to fight #capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable & well fed while all around you people are starving."
- Sylvia Pankhurst.

Sylvia was committed to organising working-class women in London's East End, & unwilling in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, she broke with the suffragette leadership of her mother Emmeline Pankhurst, & her sister, Christabel.

Sylvia was a vocal supporter of Irish independence; of anti-colonial struggle throughout the British Empire; & of anti-fascist solidarity in Europe. From 1935 she was devoted to the cause of Ethiopia, & after WWII, she spent her life as a guest of restored emperor Haile Selassie.

Sylvia undertook two speaking tours in the USA in 1911/12. Writing letters home, mostly to Keir Hardie, she described herself as having to persuade her largely middle-class hosts that sweated female labour & mother-child poverty was as much a feature of the New World as the Old.

She related her experience of going into factories, workshops, workhouses & prisons, of observing the application of Taylorist principles (rendering workers "part of the machinery"), & of witnessing in the South the virtual criminalisation of African Americans.

In January 1911 she was in Chicago. A strike wave, which had begun in 1909 with “the uprising of the 20,000” mostly immigrant, Jewish women workers in the sweatshops of New York, had spread to the city's clothing workers. Union pickets had been beaten & arrested, & two shot dead.

Sylvia visited strikers in cells, noting their conditions were as bad as what British suffragettes were subject to.

She observed in laundry workers the same ability to overcome through collective action the racial, ethnic & sexual divisions systematically exploited by employers.

In April 1912 Sylvia joined the funeral procession in NYC for the 146 garment workers killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Speaking at the funeral, she said that their deaths were the result of working class people being denied the right to represent themselves.

Like many suffragists Sylvia spent time in prison, being arrested 15 times while campaigning for women's rights. Pankhurst was aged 24 when she went to prison for the first time. Between February 1913 & July 1914 she was arrested eight times, each time being repeatedly force-fed.

She had a close personal relationship with the
@UKLabour's Keir Hardie. On 1 November 1913, Pankhurst showed her support in the Dublin Lockout.

Members of the WSPU, particularly her sister Christabel, did not agree with her actions, & consequently expelled her from the union.

Her expulsion led to her founding of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914, which over the years evolved politically, & changed its name accordingly, first to the Women's Suffrage Federation & then to the Workers' Socialist Federation.

She founded the newspaper of the WSF, Women's Dreadnought, & employed Mary Phillips to write for it, subsequently becoming the Workers' Dreadnought.

The federation campaigned against the First World War, & some of its members hid conscientious objectors from the police.

The UK government disliked Sylvia's pro-Communist articles in her newspaper & she was imprisoned for five months for sedition. It was after she was released from prison that Sylvia renamed her organization the Workers' Socialist Federation.

Her organisation attempted to defend the interests of working class women in the poorer parts of London. It set up "cost-price" restaurants to feed the hungry without the taint of charity. It also established a toy factory to give work to women who were unemployed due to the war.

She also worked to defend the right of soldiers' wives to decent allowances while their husbands were away, both practically, by setting up legal advice centres, & politically, by running campaigns to oblige the government to take into account the poverty of soldiers' wives.

In 1915, Sylvia gave her enthusiastic support to the International Women's Peace Congress, held at The Hague. Winston Churchill called the 180 women from the British suffrage movement who wanted to go “These Dangerous Women”. Vilified in the press, just 24 were granted passports.

Sylvia was a supporter of the Russian Revolution in 1917, & visited Moscow where she met Lenin, ending up arguing with him over the issue of censorship, & defying Moscow in endorsing a syndicalist programme of workers' control & by criticising the emerging Soviet dictatorship!

Sylvia began living with Silvio Erasmus Corio, an Italian socialist. They moved to Woodford Green & in 1927, at the age of forty-five, she gave birth to her only child, Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst, named after Richard Pankhurst, Keir Hardie & Frederick Pethick-Lawrence.

Sylvia upset her mum Emmeline & sister Christabel, by refusing to marry the boy's father. As a biographer, June Hannam, has pointed out: "She had long believed in sexual freedom &, despite pressure from Christabel, lived out her ideas in practice by refusing to marry."

She wrote many books, & in the 1930s supported the republicans in Spain, helped Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, & led the campaign against the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. As late as 1948, MI5 considered various strategies for "muzzling the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst."

Sylvia died in Addis Ababa in 1960, aged 78, & received a full state funeral at which Haile Selassie named her "an honorary Ethiopian".

She is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, in a section reserved for patriots of the Italian war.

Her name and picture (& those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018, while a musical about her life entitled Sylvia will run from January - April 2023 at The Old Vic Theatre.

To learn more about Sylvia, read 'Natural Born Rebel', by Ruth Holmes.

"Holmes has produced a towering tribute to a truly remarkable figure... it is impossible not to be awestruck by Sylvia Pankhurst's humanity & relentless, campaigning zeal."
- Wendy Moore, Literary Review.

Sylvia Pankhurst was "a major political figure of the twentieth century who deserves to be better known. This is a moving, powerful biography of a woman whose desire to connect "with all the world" is an inspiration for our uncertain times."
- Sally Alexander, Guardian.

"Natural Born Rebel is an astonishing, comprehensive, personal & political cradle-to-grave biography that surely stands alone as the definitive volume on an extraordinary woman: a suffragette, activist & artist for whom sacrifice & suffering were second nature."
- Diane Atkinson.